Searching for the New
Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women’s
Bodies evolved out of my need to better understand the roles women play in
the lives, identities, ideas, and writings of black men. As both an undergraduate and graduate
scholar, I recognized that many of the experiences I was having with the black
men around me—from my father and black male friends to potential love
interests—were echoed in the literature I was reading. It quickly became clear to me that the
tensions, conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings that seemed inherent
in intraracial relations between black men and women had a history and context.
Representations of relationships between
black men and women in the literature helped me to understand how the hegemonic
forces of racism, sexism, and homophobia could deform and pathologize black
intraracial relations. Moreover, in many
cases the oppositional relationships represented in the literature were echoed
in the scholarship and critical debates in which some black men and women
disparaged each other’s work in the name of arguing, for example, the Afrocentric
aims of the Black Aesthetic versus poststructuralist elitism or masculinist
versus feminist (or womanist) ideals.
Searching for the New
Black Man began as an attempt to think through representations of (black)
women in the literature of black men. However,
as the project progressed several fundamental questions drove the analysis: How are women’s bodies functioning within
constructions of ideal masculinity; What are the costs not only to black men
but black communities of adhering to ideals originating in white,
heteronormative, patriarchal masculinity; And are there black men and women who
work as allies in the coterminous struggles against capitalist patriarchy,
racism, sexism, and homophobia? These
questions lead me to the work of black female/male feminists such as Michael
Awkward, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gary Lemons, Patricia Hill Collins, Mark Anthony
Neal, Athena Mutua, and David Ikard.
Thus, Searching for
the New Black Man not only contextualizes and interrogates formations of
ideal black manhood across the historical terrain provided by the African American
male literary tradition—from slave narratives to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois,
Richard Wright’s Native Son, James
Baldwin’s Another Country, and Walter
Mosley’s Always Outnumber, Always Outgunned
and Walkin’ the Dog— but also develops
a collaboratively gendered methodology to elucidate texts that challenge
hegemonic masculinities. Using
representations of women as “barometers” (a conception articulated by Jeffrey
Leak), Athena Mutua’s articulations of progressive black masculinities, and
Mark Anthony Neal’s conceptions of the “NewBlackMan,” my work points up literary
identities that privilege new ways of performing black masculinities. These progressive identities draw not only on
masculine ideals, but the insights and critiques of black feminism to reimagine
how powerful and liberatory black
masculinities can be constructed and performed in the twenty-first century.
The book culminates with an analysis of the quintessential example
of this—and the extent to which literary narratives can shape “real” life choices
and identities—in the production and dissemination of Barack Obama’s brand of black
male feminist masculinity. His public literary
campaign for elective office began with his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and culminated with his successful election to
the presidency of the United States. I
argue that Barack Obama’s performance of a progressive, black male feminist
sensibility funded his ability to craft a black masculinity both black and
white voters could be comfortable with.
Consequently, paralleling the ways in which W.E.B. Du Bois served as the
quintessential model of black middle-class masculinist identity for the twentieth
century—and the triumphs, interventions, contradictions, pathologies, silences,
and contestations inherent within this (which I discuss in Chapter Two)—Barack
Obama’s progressive, black male feminist constructions of masculinity set the
terms for a whole new century of expressions of powerful black masculine
identities.
